When the first white explorers arrived in the early seventeenth century, they found the settled, agricultural society of the Iroquois a contrast to the nomadic culture of the neighboring Algonquians.

Historically, there is no obvious comparable social development in the region among the two major cultural groups that would most likely have descended from these Early Late Woodland peoples: the Algonquians and Iroquoians.

The Algonquians destroyed wolves and exchanged black wolf skins as ceremonial gifts, and the English seemed prepared to enter and expand this trade, offering native hunters cloth, corn, and ammunition in return for wolf heads.